Roland Emmerich is pretty experienced when it comes to destroying the White House. His newest directorial effort, White House Down, shows audiences that the world’s most recognizable house isn’t as secure as you may think. But fans of his are more likely to recognize the greatest destruction of the White House in Independence Day.

Talks of a sequel started to arise in recent years, but what those talks contained in terms of story were withheld from the public. But now that White House Down is coming up, an Independence Day follow-up could be Emmerich’s next project, as new details on the eventual sequel are coming out. Check out below when the story could occur and which character might reappear.

Emmerich and his producing partner Dean Delvin have confirmed that there will be two Independence Day sequels coming out in the near future: ID Forever Part One and ID Forever Part Two. Delvin worked on the drafts to both projects, while The Amazing Spider-Man scribe James Vanderbilt will be doing the rewrites.

The director revealed that the film will take place 20-25 years after the events of the first film. According to Emmerich, the time it takes for the aliens to travel through the wormhole to reach their destination is about 2-3 weeks, but that’s 25 human years. Here’s the full quote from Entertainment Weekly:

The humans knew that one day the aliens would come back. And they know that the only way you can really travel in space is through wormholes. So for the aliens, it could take two or three weeks, but for us that’s 20 or 25 years….It’s a changed world. It’s like parallel history. [Humans] have harnessed all this alien technology. We don’t know how to duplicate it because it’s organically-grown technology, but we know how to take an antigravity device and put it in a human airplane.

As to which characters we could see, Emmerich said that we would see Bill Pullman once more, and another character to carry the lineage of welcoming aliens to Earth by knocking them out.

It’s still some of the same characters, but also new younger characters; it’s a little bit like the sons take over. The first one ends on a little success, but only enough to give the humans hope. And then in the second one they free themselves again [from the aliens].

Guess that means the stepson of Will Smith’s character will make an appearance. But it wasn’t clear if Smith or Jeff Goldblum would reprise their roles. If anything, it means that these Independence Day sequels are more developed than we originally thought, and for fans of the original, that’s a good thing.